Among the Herculean tasks in the realm of popular culture, there may be none more daunting than this: making Van Halen look smart. The ponderous heavy-metal-lite band, perennially popular with millions of credulous teens, has not only always acted dumb, but rarely evinced any interest in acting otherwise.
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The video, for the song “Right Now,” is built around a conceit of 50 or so mini-videos, each with its own gnomic message in superimposed text. The resulting word stream manages to undercut Van Halen’s very nonliterate style and that of most videos in general. The video only happened through a number of fortuitous circumstances. “In the first place, it was the fourth single from a very successful album,” notes the 29-year-old Burns, back in Chicago between shoots for a new video. “Second, the others had been performance videos. For this one, they figured they could take some chances.”
The treatment that Burns and Fenske came up with–accepted almost unconditionally by both Warner Brothers and the band–was a series of five- to ten-second vignettes, each including a phrase beginning with the words “Right now . . . ” and using footage to underscore–or in some cases undercut–the text. Some are serious: “Right now, people are having unprotected sex” (over a black-and-white clip of energetically wriggling spermatozoa), or “Right now, someone is working too hard for minimum wage” (over slow-motion footage of Hispanics climbing into the back of a pickup). Some are goofy: “Right now, it’s business as usual in the woods” (over a full-color stock shot of a bear munching contentedly on a fish), or “Right now you are sitting too close” (over a blur). Some are a little touching–“Right now she is going on with her life” (over the image of a burning photograph of a man)–and others are little fillips for the fans: “Right now, Mike is thinking about a solo project” (as bassist Michael Anthony grins noncommittally).
Fenske assembled the custom and stock footage in LA. “Sometimes we had really good lines with no piece of footage,” says Burns. “Sometimes we had footage that produced good lines.” The video’s few band scenes were filmed on a Chicago soundstage between dates on Van Halen’s current tour. The resulting stylistic olio was part of the intent. “Right now a lot of different things are going down, right?” notes Burns. His favorite images are of the bear eating the fish and the elegantly understated stick-figure animation (created by some students of Fenske’s) for the line “Right now, our government is doing things we think only other countries do.”
Sun-Times watch: After more than a year without a rock critic, the Sun-Times has hired Jim DeRogatis, who’s spent the last few years in Minneapolis helping edit Request, the not-bad music magazine owned by the Musicland record-store chain. DeRogatis is from New Jersey; trivia fans will remember that he was the drummer in the Ex Lion Tamers, a joke band that toured with Wire in 1987 and performed the whole of Wire’s Pink Flag as an opening act.
